While in Chiang Mai Ted and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. If someone had told us in 2006 where we’d be five years later, I’d hardly have believed them. However, I would have been thrilled to know that we were actually doing our round-the-world trip that we were already dreaming about back then!

We had a lovely day, beginning with delicious fresh-fruit smoothies from the best juice lady in town. After an awesome yoga class taught by our new Mexican friend Poncho, and lunch with fellow yogis Juanse and Clari from Puerto Rico, we spent the rest of the afternoon digesting in preparation of our Thai cooking class.

This lady made the best fruit smoothies in Thailand!

Juanse and Clari after yoga class at Namo studio

Lunch with our yoga crew

We had such a fantastic time at our Indian cooking class, that we decided another class was in order, as Thai is up there with Indian food as one of our favorites. Unlike India where things were more informal and where we literally cooked in our teacher’s kitchen, the Thai cooking class was a very neat and orderly operation on a large outdoor patio where we each had our own wok and cooking station. We lucked out and had the owner, Gayray, as our instructor so we got to learn from the best (our expat friend Chad turned us on to Gayray’s class – there is quite the cooking class culture here, so we were thankful to have the excellent recommendation).

Gayray explains our options for cooking class

We were in a group with four other people – 3 fellow Americans and 1 Canadian. Our not-so diverse group had to decide which types of food/courses we wanted to learn how to cook and we selected: appetizers, noodle dishes, soups and curries. As you can imagine, there was plenty of food to go around.

Ted mans the wok

Sarah grinds with the mortor and pestle

Group shot with Gayray

The next few hours flew by. Before we knew it we were cranking out spring rolls, pad thai, tom yum soup and massaman curry. There is a surprising amount of overlap between dishes so once you have the base of your soup made or your chili paste mortared and pestled, you can easily make several different delicious options quite easily. We learned about the importance of fish sauce, oyster sauce and oil to nearly every dish and it was fun and surprising to learn about the different items used to make dishes sweet, salty, spicy and sour.

Yeah, we made that! Tom Yum soup

Khao Sawy, a northern Thai speciality

Needless to say we had a memorable and fun 5th anniversary dinner, and I look forward to finding out where we will be celebrating in another five years.